Ying Xie

Qiaomu Li, Ying Xie

Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving towards multi-agent systems where numerous AI agents collaborate and interact with external tools. Two key open standards, Google's Agent to Agent (A2A) protocol for inter-agent communication and Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) for standardized tool access, promise to overcome the limitations of fragmented, custom integration approaches. While their potential synergy is significant, this paper argues that effectively integrating A2A and MCP presents unique, emergent challenges at their intersection, particularly concerning semantic interoperability between agent tasks and tool capabilities, the compounded security risks arising from combined discovery and execution, and the practical governance required for the envisioned "Agent Economy". This work provides a critical analysis, moving beyond a survey to evaluate the practical implications and inherent difficulties of combining these horizontal and vertical integration standards. We examine the benefits (e.g., specialization, scalability) while critically assessing their dependencies and trade-offs in an integrated context. We identify key challenges increased by the integration, including novel security vulnerabilities, privacy complexities, debugging difficulties across protocols, and the need for robust semantic negotiation mechanisms. In summary, A2A+MCP offers a vital architectural foundation, but fully realizing its potential requires substantial advancements to manage the complexities of their combined operation.

Lili Zhang, Quanyan Zhu, Herman Ray et al.

Network threat detection has been challenging due to the complexities of attack activities and the limitation of historical threat data to learn from. To help enhance the existing practices of using analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence methods to detect the network threats, we propose an integrated modelling framework, where Knowledge Graph is used to analyze the users' activity patterns, Imbalanced Learning techniques are used to prune and weigh Knowledge Graph, and LLM is used to retrieve and interpret the users' activities from Knowledge Graph. The proposed framework is applied to Agile Threat Detection through Online Sequential Learning. The preliminary results show the improved threat capture rate by 3%-4% and the increased interpretabilities of risk predictions based on the users' activities.

Linh Le, Ying Xie

In this paper, we propose a novel supervised learning method that is called Deep Embedding Kernel (DEK). DEK combines the advantages of deep learning and kernel methods in a unified framework. More specifically, DEK is a learnable kernel represented by a newly designed deep architecture. Compared with pre-defined kernels, this kernel can be explicitly trained to map data to an optimized high-level feature space where data may have favorable features toward the application. Compared with typical deep learning using SoftMax or logistic regression as the top layer, DEK is expected to be more generalizable to new data. Experimental results show that DEK has superior performance than typical machine learning methods in identity detection, classification, regression, dimension reduction, and transfer learning.